Judging the web to be satisfactory, though it was an amateur mess he didn’t want to show anyone, he called Olivia.
“Yes, Rune?” Immediately after pressing the call button, it got answered.
“What! How are you so fast?!” Rune exclaimed in surprise.
“The support team received new equipment just 3 days ago, the Arcadia stairways project helped us accelerate the timeline,” she explained leisurely.
“Cool, I called to give you more work to do, you still use the same address?”
“Send it,” from her tone, Rune imagined her wearing a “I don’t care” face.
“Kay.”
Having prepared for it, he sent everything, the stopwatch marks, the experiment video, and a compressed synthesis of what his first thoughts were about how to approach the project.
“Read the synthesis and ask away anything that comes to your mind,” he said with a stupidly arrogant face, his plan to not talk was pure genius.
“Yeah… Ok,” Her weird tone didn’t affect him one bit.
With the call on, he couldn’t put the ether tower away, so he started to pack everything else. The future expedition that would come here didn’t need adventurers' stuff, they’d have everything planned beforehand to establish a true research camp.
Once the lights turned off and collected into his pocket dimension the camp was plunged into darkness, but that was only for his eyes, and even then he sometimes saw strings of white ether shimmering and glittering, only to vanish like they didn’t exist.
Olivia didn’t even try to make her presence known through blank noises, she read silently and was probably writing a list of things to ask, or was engineering her action plan as she reads.
‘Maybe she’ll just say she got it and hang up, what are the chances it happens, the world is dark, Rune, get used to it.’
Immediately after thinking that.
‘Is that a punchline?’
“Ok, Rune I’ll manage that, you have a gift to clearly explain things with as few words as possible.”
Ensued by a few seconds of silence.
“You’re an angel, Olivia, anything else?” In his vision, the dark tunnel became a bit brighter.
“We've got some procedures for cases like yours, though it should be the first time they’re applied, so I already contacted a superior. I’ll hang up, but make sure to call me when you get to the surface, I’ll have the following directive.”
“Ok.”
And the call was really hung up.
‘Fast, concise, optimized, and it looks like fate wants me to make my 2 reports, maybe 3 if I make a separate one for the tunnel exploration? Then I’ll transmit everything.’
Collapsing the ether tower, Rune made it disappear and started his ascension towards the bright world, also called, the surface.
‘If it’s night when I get out…’
…
Once he got the hang of writing with his connected lenses while maintaining his maximum momentum speed and adjusting his trajectory, he found it satisfying.
3 days were largely enough to complete his 3 reports, re-read them, and re-re-read them again, he added everything relevant and considered them completed for now.
“Hahaha!” Laughing out loud from the thought of students possibly having to do their exams in those conditions, he couldn’t stop himself.
“Hahahahaha! No! Stop it brain! Hahaha!” The more he thought about it, the more detailed it became. Once he added a chair and a table per student to the mix, as well as their intense struggles and anguish to write, he once again lost it.
After his self-inflicted joke stopped making him laugh, he returned to using his strength to climb. At more than 600 meters per second, he calculated he would arrive within the next hour.
Maybe it was really an hour, maybe it was less, but once he saw the surface with his sphere, he was happy to be out, with nothing abnormal taking place, like being warped somewhere else or being ambushed.
The bird that kindly made him discover this tunnel wasn’t there, as could be expected, so he got the ether tower out, activated it, and called Olivia.
“Hello, Rune.”
“Hu!” He jumped in surprise, “It’s really too fast! I call a subterfuge! You’re hiding something!”
“Perhaps… Who knows...” She let her words silence him.
“Anyway, I got all the instructions needed and already transmitted everything. As for what you have to do, you need to create a cavity near the surface and leave behind your ether tower, turned on of course, as well as everything you don’t need in your own pocket dimension.”
“You mean my garbage artificial lights or my top-of-the-line science goodies? Everything?” Confused, Rune couldn’t help but ask for clarifications.
“Yeah I also think it’s stupid, but it was already written on the theoretical plan before your situation came up, so just leave behind what you don’t need anymore. When a further expedition is launched, they’ll gather everything and do what they have to, not your problem.”
‘Why am I even more confused?’
“Ok, anything else?” Not conveying his confusion, he asked the usual question for when he wanted to be on his way.
“Nothing else for you Rune, make sure your tower is turned on and that’s it, good luck to you, goodbye.”
And the call was hung up.
“Alright…” Looking over at the tower, he collapsed it, collected it, and once again jumped into the hole tunnel, only stopping at about 50 meters below ground to make another small cavity.
Once the ether tower fitted just right inside and it was turned on, he emptied the majority of his artificial lights, a majority of his surplus tools like a second sample box, and that was it.
‘That was a short but intense adventure challenge as I like them, and now maybe I’ll be able to put my provided masteries to work?’
Now that he was a tier 4, he was locked from tiering up in the short-term, so he was planning everything long-term, like when he reduced his passive training list.
‘The best would be to rush home, then create my composite element, and then create my true provided build. Then I’d just go back to a tier 2 zone and level everything again, refreshing my fighting style by the same occasion.’
He had more than an entire day during his ascension, after having finished writing 3 reports, to think about what his immediate plan would be, so everything was clear in his mind.
‘I’ll have to purge everything, I don’t have a tower anymore, this region is gigantic and probably empty…’
Now that he was acting on his plan though, he realized it was even more true.
‘My past self is a genius, how did he come up with such a plan without the arguments I just came up with and without knowing I’d lose my tower?’
Praising himself, or his himself from the past, he finally started to move following his flat compass direction to make sure he was going west.
And a few minutes after departing, he encountered a monster. Still in the tier 4 zone of the mountainous region, it was rational to judge it to be a tier 4.
‘Well…’
‘What was that punchline? Between practice and theory… Theory never works as intended?’
Coming up with a sufficient reason to break his “rush home” directive in his perfect plan turned out to be easier than expected.
“Hello, big blue lizard! You’re in my way, so I have no choice but to fight you! Reasonable, right?”
The monster didn’t approve of his salutation and engaged in something Rune could recognize just from the sound.
A mindless charge.
“I wasn’t expecting anything else,” nodding repeatedly, he made sure his energy pool and energy armor matrix were full.
‘Oops, I nearly forgot to adjust my reinf… Or maybe?’
With an energy compression efficiency of 1 021% and an energy regeneration stat of 7 735, he theoretically had a 56 000 armor that regained 1 445 armor per second.
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‘Maybe I can keep pumping nearly all my regen into it and just switch all of it when I take damage? And I go full behemoth mode? I just got a massive amount of space to fill after all…’
Unfortunately, the speed of his thoughts, even with twice as much time with his specialty, didn’t allow him to sort everything in the few seconds the blue lizard took to collide head-first with him.
Feet slipping on the rocky ground proved all his strength and his reinforcement didn’t allow him to equal the blue lizard’s strength.
‘Well, bye-bye behemoth style, hello my own style.’
…
Putting the whole carcass in his pocket dimension, Rune felt relaxed, as if he just did an hour-long yoga and meditation session.
Though it may also be attributed to the effect of having done an hour-long fight to the death, which equals an intense sports session, which also has the same relaxation effect.
A week of falling, adopting a philosophical mindset, and 3 days of writing had inhibited his fighting-addict side.
*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement reached Tier 4 Level 3
*Ding* Energy Compression: Provided Energy Armor reached Tier 1 Level 1
*Ding* Energy Compression: Provided Energy Defense reached Tier 1 Level 1
*Ding* Energy Compression: Provided Energy Structure reached Tier 1 Level 1
‘Hehehe, maybe I’ll call those three the triplets? And in the future, they’ll get a bunch of little brothers and sisters.’
A simple fight and they got a simple single level, as all masteries should when they were only tier 1, and in some manners, tier 2, if it was active leveling.
‘But with my composite element taking one slot…’
Masteries
Tier 1 Masteries
Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement: Tier 4 Level 3
Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct: Tier 4 Level 6
Physical Fundamental: Body Control: Tier 4 Level 6
Energy Fundamental: Fine Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 1
Energy Fundamental: Grand Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 1
Energy Fundamental: Energy Compression: Tier 4 Level 6
Spiritual Fundamental: Perception Control: Tier 4 Level 1
Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division: Tier 4 Level 1
Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 2
Tier 2 Masteries
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Armor: Tier 4 Level 5
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Defense: Tier 4 Level 5
Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion: Tier 4 Level 5
Tier 3 Masteries
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Structure: Tier 4 Level 5
Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body: Tier 4 Level 5
Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use: Tier 4 Level 5
Tier 4 Masteries
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Armor: Tier 1 Level 1
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Defense: Tier 1 Level 1
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Structure: Tier 1 Level 1
‘One element, one infusion, two body control, five energy compression, oh dear such a good build!’
Just imagining his future adventuring build made him want to fight another tier 4 monster for an hour.
‘No! Focus, focus.’
Organizing his thoughts, he oriented himself correctly. Last he checked, just an hour ago, he had drifted north a lot more than he expected. And while going straight west would get him back eventually, if he oriented himself just a bit more south, but not too much, he would be ok and back home quicker.
Nonetheless, having interpreted the “rushing home” part of his plan, he wasn’t against a slower but more eventful journey through the tier 4 zone of the region.
It would be the last time he fought at his maximum for a long while if he wasn’t deluding himself concerning the difficulty of creating his composite element.
‘Once I create it, however…’
Just thinking about this subject, all his future plans of shonen training came to his mind.
‘I’m sure I’ll reach beyond perception in at least 100 years!’
…
Momentum manipulation, awareness division, and reinforcement.
Those were the subjects of Rune’s rumination during his travels, between the intense fights that he used to clear his mind.
When he started to see tier 3 monsters, those intense fights evolved to steam-evacuation fights, a more relaxing version of fighting he could appreciate at their fair value.
He still wanted to gather EP, he had a debt of 9 billion EP to pay off, after all, so he adopted the efficient gathering mode of “killing the loner and small groups with the behemoth style, and fleeing the big monster squads and armies with style”.
And despite trying his best on only those 3 subjects, he couldn’t find a solution.
In truth, he already rationalized that reinforcement’s fate was already sealed, as were the other categories of “Composite element path”, including his perception control and his grand and fine manipulation, and “Adventuring path”, including his body control, his fighting instinct and his energy compression.
So it all came down to managing his two remaining spiritual fundamentals, which didn’t have a place.
He thought of including momentum manipulation into his fighting style, actively leveling it in fighting, and leaving his awareness division training for travel times, and if he didn’t find anything else, it would be the best stopgap solution he had.
He also thought of taking a specialization mastery for one of them, but awareness had specializations that were always too customized, and he couldn’t think of anything he could do with momentum that would replace his boosted strength.
So even after all this cogitation, he ended back to square one, with only a half-solution that didn’t solve the problem.
But maybe a little of Nelo’s stubbornness passed on to him, as when he punched a famous species of goat that loved killing themselves, he continued to think.
‘Nope, can’t think of anything, don’t need sight, smell, touch, not even sensitivity.’
Although he already closed the case and wanted to seek help in the future, he still tried, just to end up disappointed again.
The goat, also on the speedster path, etherly couldn’t kill him, its damage output was too low.
Maybe if Rune did nothing but regenerate without blocking any hit at all, only then would he get a negative spike in his energy balance.
‘Or maybe, it has the boosted momentum specialization, and it can hit me 4 times per second, and I’ll not be able to count…’
It didn’t happen.
Putting the whole corpse into his pocket dimension, he could only feel anguished at not getting an illumination as to what to do with his momentum and awareness training.
And only then had he enough of this subject.
So he stopped thinking about it after writing his last conclusion, and got back to the adventurer mindset that made him enjoy everything he saw for the first, and perhaps last time.
…
‘Yup, now that I put everything down, it’s so weird that I encountered a peak tier 4 there…’
The tier 3 zone of the mountainous region was big, bigger than any other tier 3 zone on the current explored world, but at more than 600 meters per second, it only took him a month for tier 3 monsters to completely disappear, and for trees to appear.
Without any more danger even if he searched for it, Rune switched gears to “back garden stroll”.
Before coming back to the tier 2 mountainous zone, he encountered for the first time a “mountain” variant of the “forest” path, and it didn’t look like much, it was only a path with two “moat” on each side and twinning around the surrounding mountains.
If the use of those paths was hiking or trekking, he would say they were very basic, however, the truth was that like the one he made with the Undecided, it was only one amongst thousands of other ones, all leading back towards civilization.
And Rune could appreciate that.
To pass the time, he finished the only report he couldn’t yet conclude, the expedition report.
He added his home itinerary and anything that recently happened, as well as his recent insight that the bird that nearly killed him shouldn’t have been where it was.
Another thing he… Re-discovered? After entering the tier 2 zone, was something he heard on the news a lot, something to which he answered by “Yup, that’s cool.”
A few seconds passed, and in his sphere, “people” appeared.
It was already the 3rd group in under 100 kilometers.
He traveled 100 kilometers in less than 20 seconds.
And monsters were generally only separated by ten or so kilometers.
‘That’s f*cked up,’ he thought.
‘That’s f*cked up,’ he thought again.
‘Really f*cked up,’ he continued thinking, ‘Why wasn’t this on the news? Am I in a particularly highly populated area?’
He saw groups of people before those 3, but never so near to each other.
‘Maybe I can camp here to see first-hand the zone repopulation? No, I don’t have any info on when it’s going to happen, and I’ll not talk to strangers for such a useless piece of info… Maybe I can leech a bit of interest when some set up their tower?’
His mind went wild for a bit, but he had so much to take into account that he only remembered something crucial after a few seconds.
‘Wait… They’re only tier 2, so they don’t have a personal ether tower… And once I find a camp anyway I’ll…’
It has always been like this, it will always be like this. Overthinking useless matters and forgetting important bits.
‘Or maybe I already have the internet, but I just didn’t test it?’
Sweeping his vision three times to the right, he was comforted and frustrated that he truly didn’t have access to the internet, not even the most useless level of “edge”.
*Ding* Physical Fundamental: Body Control reached Tier 4 Level 9
*Ding* Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body reached Tier 4 Level 8
*Ding* Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use: reached Tier 4 Level 8
‘Shouldn’t my awar-’
*Ding* Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division reached Tier 4 Level 3
‘-eness be my next… Ok ether, shame on me, but I don’t think I’ll use my basic masteries again in the future, so you’re half useless and half-welcome.’
1 month and 1 week.
That’s the time he took to gain 2 levels in his awareness division fundamental.
‘2 weeks and a half, that’s relatively fast, but the price to pay is…’
He opened his masteries window.
Masteries
Tier 1 Masteries
Physical Fundamental: Reinforcement: Tier 4 Level 5
Physical Fundamental: Fighting Instinct: Tier 4 Level 8
Physical Fundamental: Body Control: Tier 4 Level 9
Energy Fundamental: Fine Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 1
Energy Fundamental: Grand Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 1
Energy Fundamental: Energy Compression: Tier 4 Level 8
Spiritual Fundamental: Perception Control: Tier 4 Level 1
Spiritual Fundamental: Awareness Division: Tier 4 Level 3
Spiritual Fundamental: Momentum Manipulation: Tier 4 Level 4
Tier 2 Masteries
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Armor: Tier 4 Level 7
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Defense: Tier 4 Level 7
Cohesion: Specialized Cohesion Infusion: Tier 4 Level 7
Tier 3 Masteries
Energy Compression: Basic Energy Structure: Tier 4 Level 7
Body Control: Basic Humanoid Body: Tier 4 Level 8
Body Control: Basic Prolonged Body Use: Tier 4 Level 8
Tier 4 Masteries
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Armor: Tier 1 Level 28
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Defense: Tier 1 Level 28
Energy Compression: Provided Energy Structure: Tier 1 Level 28
“Sigh…”
It was a long-term goal, he comforted himself with this thought.
‘Maybe if I engage in death training every day I can up my fighting-dependent masteries to 1 level per week? But even then my spiritual fundamentals…’
Even his mind was tired just thinking about everything he had to do to reach tier 5.
Just as he wanted to pull himself together after this blow from the Ether Law and continue, and finish, his expedition report conclusion, his sphere informed him that 5 kilometers in front.
There was a wall.
And a construction team.
And cranes.
And workers.
Lots of workers.